Category Archives: Supplier Management

Tealbook: Laying the Groundwork for the Supplier Data Foundations

It wasn’t that long ago that we asked you if you had a data foundation because a procurement management platform, should you be lucky enough to get one (which is much more than a suite), generally only supports the data it needs for Procurement to function and doesn’t support the rest of the organization. Furthermore, when you look across the Source-to-Pay and Supply Chain spectrums, there are a lot of different applications that support a lot of different processes that have a lot of different data requirements that need to be maintained as different data types in different encoding formats.

Furthermore, as we noted in the aforementioned post, it’s rare enough to find MDM capability that will even support procurement. This is because most suites are built on transactions, most supplier networks on relational supplier data records, and contracts on documents and simple, hierarchical, meta-data indexes. But you also need models, meta-models, semi-structured, unstructured, and media support. And more. The need is broad, and even if you restrict the need to supplier data, it’s quite broad.

As you will soon garner from our ongoing Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive series, in which we just started tackling Supplier Management in Part XV, the supplier data an organization needs is extremely varied and extensive. Given that Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP mash with ten (10) major areas of functionality, not counting broader enterprise needs around ESG, innovation, product design / manufacturing management, and other needs tied to operations management, engineering, and enterprise risk management, among other functions, it’s easy to see just how difficult even Supplier Master Data Management can be.

Considering not a single Supplier Management solution vendor (as you will come to understand as we progress through the Source-to-Pay is Extensive series) covers all of the basic functions we’re outlining, it’s obviously that not a single vendor can effectively do Supplier Master Data Management today. However, Tealbook, which has realized this since their exception, is aiming to be the first to fix this problem. As of the first release of their open API next month, they are transitioning to a Supplier Data Platform and will no longer focus on being just a supplier discovery platform or diversity data enrichment platform. (They will still offer those services, and will be upgrading them in Q4 with general release expected by the end of 2023, but their primary focus will be on the supplier data foundation that enables this.)

This is significant, and illustrates how far they’ve come in the nine (9) years since their founding when their original focus was on building a community supplier intelligence platform that was reliable, scalable, extensible, and appropriate for new supplier discovery (via a large database of verified suppliers with community reviews). From these humble beginnings, where they didn’t even have a million suppliers in their platform after their third year of existence, they grew into the largest supplier network with over 5 Million detailed supplier profiles that is integrated with the largest S2P suites out there (Ariba, GEP, Ivalua, Jaggaer, and Workday, to name a few) and powers some of the largest organizations on the planet. As part of this empowerment, they can take in an organization’s entire supplier data ecosystem, transform it into their standard formats, match to their records, verify or correct existing data, and then enrich the organization’s supplier records before sending them back. In addition, they integrate with a multitude of BI tools, databases / lakes / warehouses (including ERPs), digital platforms, and so on.

To summarize, that’s a ten fold increase in suppliers and an explosion in global utilization and usage. At the same time, the platform has been augmented with over 2.3M supplier certifications, global diversity data, and the ability to track an organization’s tier 2 supplier diversity data. Quite impressive.

And while this meets most of an organization’s discovery needs, Tealbook knew that it didn’t meet all of an organization’s supplier data needs, especially when you think about all of the regulatory, financial, compliance, performance, sustainability, risk, contract, product/service, relationship, quality, and enablement/innovation data an organization needs to maintain on a supplier. As a result, they have been aggressively working on two key pieces of functionality. An extended universal supplier profile and a fully open, extensible, API that an organization can use to do supplier master data management across their enterprise with the Tealbook Supplier Data Platform. An organization can use the Tealbook Supplier Data Platform to classify, cleanse, and enrich supplier records; augment those records with third party data for sustainability, compliance, and risk; find new suppliers in the network; and so on.

In short, Tealbook is on a mission to be the organization’s trusted supplier data source, and to constantly improve their data offering both with their own ML/AI enabled technology that monitors over 400M+ public websites for supplier-related data (supplier web sites, business registries, certification providers, supplier data providers, etc. etc. etc.), maintains data provenance (when was it last updated, by what/who, etc.), and provides trust scores (in their proprietary framework that indicates Tealbook’s confidence in accuracy and correctness).

The real mission begins next month when they release their new Open API that will allow an organization to integrate, and interact with, Tealbook the way it needs to across its enterprise applications. Congruent with this release, they will also start releasing their enrichment data-packs that will, within the next year, allow the organization to plug-and-play the data they need to confirm firmographics, contact channels and key information, diversity, supplier offerings, financials, certifications, and basic risk data (which Tealbook will offer through partnerships with specialty supplier data providers, giving an organization a one-stop shop vs. having to license with multiple providers separately to build its 360-degree supplier profile).

Then, over the next year, Tealbook will enhance the usability of their data platform by first rebuilding their diversity and discovery applications and then building out new applications around sustainability, risk, benchmarking, and other areas that their customers would rather a data platform handle for them.

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P15) … And So Is Supplier Management! It’s a CORNED QUIP!

That’s right, Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP! And we’ll explain what we mean shortly, but first … how did we get here?

When we started this series back in Part 1, we noted that Source-to-Pay is extensive, your organization needed all of it, but your organization couldn’t implement it all at once. So we needed to give you advice on where to start, which, after a careful analysis, needed to be e-Procurement. Next came spend analysis because, in the hands of the right analyst, if your organization wasn’t sure what module was the next most valuable, spend analysis would help the organization identify which modules would likely bring the most (relative) value (based upon the opportunities spend analysis identified). Often, there will be a clear winner, and your organization will know what module to start implementing tomorrow, but sometimes there won’t be. So what’s the answer then? When you are dependent on suppliers, there is no value beyond the supplier. Thus, in this situation, Supplier Management comes next.

But why is Supplier Management a CORNED QUIP? A good solution preserves and maintains the data, like a good cure, but the marketing from most of the vendors with these solutions is more entertaining than enlightening (as they seem to prefer wit to wisdom). This, of course, is not at all helpful when there are literally ten (10) different types, or at least aspects, of supplier management solutions on the marketplace, no one vendor addresses all of the aspects in their solution, and, in many cases, doesn’t even address more than a couple of these aspects. Furthermore, depending on your organizational needs and the platforms your organization currently has in place, some capabilities will be much more important to your organization than other capabilities. Moreover, sometimes certain capabilities in a supplier management solution, already present in solutions already implemented by the organization, will be downright useless as these aspects will, thus, be completely redundant. So, if a vendor is just selling “Supplier Management” or “Supplier Lifecycle Management”, which theoretically includes every core type of capability (even though not a single solution on the market today comes close to materializing all the capabilities), how do you know what they are selling?

Just what might that vendor be selling when they are trying to sell you Supplier Management? One or more management aspects of the CORNED QUIP (but likely not all of those aspects, as every cure is different, and every message witty in its own way, but not exactly enlightening).

What are these ten (10), core, aspects of modern supplier management? (Which dictate the core capabilities that such a solution should offer.)

  • C: Compliance (+ Government + Regulatory)
  • O: Orchestration (or Onboarding + Multi-Tier/Multi-Supplier capability)
  • R: Relationship
  • N: Network
  • E: Enablement (+ Engagement)
  • D: Discovery
  • Q: Quality
  • U: Uncertainty (+ Risk)
  • I: Information
  • P: Performance

Now, before we continue, we know you’re saying “what about ESG” and “what about diversity“? Well, at least as of today, most of these providers are data services that you use to augment your central supplier records (in your Supplier Master Data Management [SMDM] Solution, which could be your SXM or could be the ERP that the SXM extracts data from), and not standalone SXM products, so we will tackle those separately at some point in the future (especially since diversity is literally just data enrichment on a supplier record in any current solution).

Thus, now that we know what we are implementing, our next step is to decide how to evaluate the solution. Thus, in our next post, we’ll begin to break down the ten core aspects of the CORNED QUIP and define not only what they mean, but what capabilities are critical to the cure.

On to the A-Side in Part 16.

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P14) … So Do Not Stop at Spend Analysis!

As we discussed in Part 8, once you have your eProcurement baseline, that’s just the beginning. The very beginning. Even though not all modules are equal, and not all modules will return equal results, you, and your organization, will need all of Source-to-Pay eventually. However, since you can’t implement it all at once, you take it one module at a time.

After eProcurement, if you aren’t 100% sure where the most value will come from, you go on to spend analysis and use it to help you identify the best opportunities, and those opportunities may indicate the next best module to implement (for your organization at the current time). After that, you may have a clear answer, or, you may not. Sometimes the analysis indicates almost equal opportunity between sourcing and contracting, between contracting and supplier management, or between sourcing and supplier management. (Or, you might not have the manpower or expertise to do the analysis you need to get the right answer.)

So if it’s unclear as to which solution to choose next, it’s back to arguments and logic in an effort to determine which of the three aforementioned solutions to choose.

How about Strategic Sourcing? It’s the one technology proclaimed to identify the most savings and deliver the best results. The truth is that while it almost always identifies the most savings, it doesn’t actually deliver those savings, or even guarantee them. The savings are guaranteed by the contract, delivered by the (new) supplier, and captured by the eProcurement system.

So how about a Contract Management System? In order to guarantee the cost reductions, you need the contract. Or it’s just a quote that’s given today, denied tomorrow. But, as we indicated in a prior post, you don’t need a contract management system for a contract. You need (e-)paper, (e-)ink, and a pair of (e-)signatures. The right contract management system makes it easy to author, negotiate, manage, track, and enforce a contract. But the contract itself is up to people, and if they don’t agree, there’s no contract, and, thus, no need for a contract management system.

This just leaves Supplier Management. But is this where we start? If we think about the value sourcing identifies, it’s generated by the supplier. So it’s critical that the supplier perform. If we have a good supplier management solution, it will track the supplier’s progress, alert us to issues, and assist us in managing the relationship if intervention is required. It will enable performance management, which is critical because if the supplier doesn’t perform and/or doesn’t adhere to the contract, then it doesn’t matter how great the sourcing event was or how good the contract inked was.

And so, because suppliers, and relationships with them, are key, when all things are about equal, or when it’s hard to identify where to go next, we go with supplier management.

Start the dive in Part 15.

Are You Effectively Using Your “Extended Enterprise”?

For many businesses, more than 50% of their workforce is employed by their suppliers. It is their suppliers who make and provide the crucial products and services upon which their own business depends. So, it makes sense to consider how they can best manage those suppliers as part of their ‘extended enterprise’.

Greater connection and collaboration with your extended enterprise can bring multiple benefits. Among them better access to specialised products or market knowledge; process efficiency improvements; a rise in innovation; reduced risk; improved quality control; boosted surety of supply; and additional flexibility.

The introduction to the 2023 Supplier Management Survey

How well do your run, or should I say orchestrate*, your supply base that constitutes your extended enterprise? Do you maximize their productivity? Capability? Innovation? Shouldn’t you know? Shouldn’t you find out?

The answer is, yes, you should be taking steps to better understand the capabilities of your supply base and use them to your advantage. The first step is to benchmark how well you are doing now. The best way to do this is with the State of Flux 15th annual 2023 Supplier Management Survey which will allow you to benchmark your organization’s maturity and performance against hundreds of your peers for free.

State of Flux is the global leading provider of supplier management research and benchmarks, as evidenced by the fact that this is their 15th year and they have been doing it longer than anyone else.

The survey is only open for a limited time, don’t miss your chance!

* keep reading the Source-to-Pay series!

How Resilient is Your Supplier Management?

Given that the state of most supply chains is still chaos, and may be for quite some time, if you don’t know, maybe you should find out!

How? Benchmark your current supplier management performance against more than 800 global organizations that participated in the 2022 State of Flux Supplier Management survey at this link (and receive a free maturity benchmark analysis for your organization).

The reality is that supplier resilience, the foundation for supply chain resilience, is becoming more important than just about any other kind of resilience as a business without the products to sell or operate is not a business, and if its suppliers are not resilient, it won’t have any sources of supply … and will not be able to operate.

That’s why, once a an organization has implemented an e-Procurement core and a sourcing core, if it has any supply issues, it should tackle SRM as soon as possible in wave 2 (and this can be done simultaneous with implementing the analytics core — after all, it’s good to have supplier data to crunch on). Plus, SRM supports end-to-end source-to-pay processes when done right, as explained in the State of Flux research publication front-material that brings you best practices from over a decade of research.

The research report, which reviews their six pillars of supplier management:

  • Value
  • Engagement
  • Governance
  • People
  • Technology
  • Collaboration

Also provides you with a four-phase action plan to guide you through your four-phase supplier management journey. At a high level, the journey is to:

  1. Explore the opportunity … with a value opportunity diagnostic
  2. Create the business case … by fleshing out the value proposition
  3. Setup and run … with supplier management in real time
  4. Scale and grow … and achieve ROI

And this is something you want to do as leaders significantly outperform on each of the pillars even compared to “fast followers” …

In a later post we’ll dive into a few of the findings, but for now, if you’re having problems (and you are), and you’re not sure how well you’re doing against peers, take the benchmark, download the report, and start planning for supplier development — even if you aren’t ready to implement a custom solution as all P2P or e-Sourcing platforms can support the basics of supplier management, and the reality is a platform isn’t a solution without a process and trained people to follow it. (And keep your eyes peeled for the State of Flux 2023 research survey which will be launching soon … responding early gets you the results early, and leaders in this space are in the best position to win!)